Andrea Olivato’s Blog

I finished realizing the second alpha of Afisufi High Tech usplash theme.  In this release I just added the possibility to show the booting text in the bottom-right corner area, matching bacgkround and text color to the theme.

I also finished working on the sources to be able to redistribute them under the terms of GPL v.3. You can find the binary and the sources in the project page.

Below you will find an updated screenshot and the new screencast.

Yesterday night I couldn’t sleep so I started developing a new usplash theme. I realized just the main loading effect but I believe that with this background the theme can become really nice! If you want to know more, go to the project page ->

Note that this theme is a pre-release version, not even near to be stable… so please,please, use it just if you’re sure of what you’re doing.

If you want to see it in action I realized a screencast from virtualbox.

Links

• Project Homepage
• Gnome Look Page
• Screencast

Setting up a svn is not a big deal on any linux box. On Linux Feed server, which is running Debian Stable,it’s just a matter of

$ sudo apt-get install subversion
$ sudo mkdir /var/svn-repos/
$ sudo svnadmin create --fs-type fsfs /var/svn-repos/dummy-project

and add the right permissions. However if you want to create more trunks, manage more users with different permission the whole process may result complex and laborious. This is why I looked for an easy-to-use web interface to administrate one ore more project, create users and groups, assign permissions to projects or sub folders.

I found Usvn a php5 + mysql (nobody likes postges out there uh???) powered admin interface, which is able to do all the operations I explained before. Obviously the whole process needs a complete control on apache and the server you’re going to run svn on, as you need to edit the apache2.conf (or httpd.conf) file, the mod_svn and mod_dav_svn activated, and obviously subversion installed.

During installation I lost 10 mins looking for the mod_dav_svn module, which I could not find with aptitude. I finally understand it was just part of the apache2-svn packagage.

So, after a bit of configuration, db setup, apache reload and  few actions more, Usvn is successfully installed, configured and ready to create users and trunks. It also support the importation of any existing repo on your panel… terribly useful if you want to start using this tool but got some existing repositories.

Here are some links:

Home Page: http://www.usvn.info
Downloads: http://www.usvn.info/download
Docs: https://trac.usvn.info/wiki/Documentation

Reading Fabrizio’s blog article I came to know about Koders, an incredible resource of open source code. Using Koders search engine you can easily find the code you were looking for, or get informations about the classes you are already using.

In fact, their database does not only contains the code but also informations about the author, the licence and the source it was cut from.

Apart from the web interface I believe the most interesting part of Koders are the IDE plugins, developed to rapidly access code’s informations directly from a developing platform. In the download page you can find the Eclipse plugin, which searches in real time any documentation, information and code related to what you’re writing on eclipse.  As shown in their screencast as soon as you declare a class/function the plugin will start a research on background and will return all the posssible related class. If you find what fits your needing you can just double click to include open source functions and classes inside your project!

Just wanted to deny myself about my previous article about Who’s Amung stat service.

Since one month all the stats provided from who’s service have been perfect, without any downtimes. Congrats to the staff, for resolving stability problem and returned to offer a great stat service.

Slim is a lightweight graphical login manager, for those who don’t know it’s something like GDM and KDM, but a bit less stressing for your hardware, very simple, minimal, easily customizable and skinnable. Also slim can be used with any Desktop Environment and got no heavy dependancies.

Fluxbox, well I hope you all have at least heard something about it, is a great lightweight window manager, that combined with a good filemanager (I prefer pcmanfm), its own panel, a light dock (using simdock here) and a bit of vim can became the right choice for any use.

Together…well you’re completely free from any Gnome,Kde influence and you got a nice and fast Desktop Environment.

For fluxbox installation and configuration there are a lot of guides. Here are my favourites for Gentoo and Ubuntu.

To install slim just use your distribution package manager. For example I did

# emerge -avt slim

or in Ubuntu

$ sudo apt-get install slim

After installin open slim configuration

# vim /etc/slim.conf

and around line 54 you will find your sessions array. Just delete sessions you don’t own or don’t want to use and then set as first session

startfluxbox

We do use the start script as doing this we will be able to use the ’startup’ script into the .fluxbox directory to start our own apps on DE booting.

Now that slim is configured you can choose to follow the white rabbit or not. If you want to, follow those passages to disable gdm/kdm and start using slim instead.

On Gentoo just change the configuration file of Xdm

# vim /etc/conf.d/xdm

replacing your current variable ‘DISPLAYMANAGER’ from any previous value to

slim

On Ubuntu (and I believe on all the debian based) remove GDM from startup and add slim

$ sudo update-rc.d -f gdm remove
$ sudo update-rc.d slim defaults

Now just logout from any grafical interface and from your shell restart the Login Manager

On Gentoo

# /etc/init.d/xdm restart

While on Ubuntu

$ sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop && sudo /etc/init.d/slim start

Everything  should work fine, and you should be able to login to your fluxbox desktop. To change session just press F11 while writing your username/password!

After some testing from me and some users I released the sh404 version of my Google news Sitemap Generator for Joomla using Sh404. Even if I prefer OpenSef plugin, lots of people use sh404 for managing url rewrite on Joomla, as it is currently on development.

You can find downloads and some instructions on the dedicated page.

The script is available for both 1.0.x and 1.5.x versions, however it was tested the most on the newer Joomla.